MarketQuest: Investment Education Game Series
Building a browser-based investment education game for children — from board game concept to Next.js + Phaser 3 production app with real Japanese economic history.
3 articles
Part 1: Teaching Kids to Invest — Why We Chose a Game
Japan mandated financial education in 2022, but most adults barely understand investing themselves. This is the story of how a decade-long quest to teach children about markets through a board game evolved from paper prototypes to a production browser game.
Part 2: Recreating Economic Cycles with Real Japanese News
How I built a Python data pipeline to transform 70 years of Japanese economic history into game-ready event data — scraping Wikipedia, modeling macro indicators, and simulating stock prices that feel authentic.
Part 3: Building a Production Browser Game with Next.js and Phaser 3
How the game-core architecture separates framework-agnostic logic from rendering, why Phaser 3 handles the board while Next.js handles everything else, and the engineering decisions behind authentication, PWA support, and i18n.